AWS OpsWorks Stacks now supports Amazon CloudWatch Logs. This benefits all users who want to stream their log files from OpsWorks instances to CloudWatch. This enables you to take advantage of CloudWatch Logs features such as centralized log archival, real-time monitoring of log data, or generating CloudWatch alarms. Until now, OpsWorks customers had to manually install and configure the CloudWatch Logs agent on every instance they wanted to ship log data from. Now, with the built-in CloudWatch Logs integration these features are made available with just a few clicks across all instances in a layer.

The OpsWorks CloudWatch logs integration is compatible with all Chef 11 and Chef 12 Linux stacks. To get started, simply click the new CloudWatch Logs tab in your layer settings screen. OpsWorks agent command logs, which include Chef recipe output, are enabled by default; to enable logging for custom log files, simply input an absolute path or file pattern for every log file you want shipped.

It’s that simple. OpsWorks creates log groups and log streams for you, and starts streaming your system and application logs within a few minutes.